Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday March 26, 2010 @03:43AM
from the blow-your-whistle-at-hookers-and-gently-reprimand-them dept.

BanjoTed writes "An interesting — if tongue-in-cheek — bit of speculation is up at MCV about the possibility of a Grand Theft Auto title across the pond. 'Chancellor Alistair Darling's pledge to support the video games development industry with tax breaks could do more than simply protect the future of the UK dev sector,' the site claims. 'It could also have dictated the setting of the next Grand Theft Auto.' Its reasoning? That developers will only be eligible for new UK tax breaks if their games can be proven to be 'culturally British.' Being based in the UK alone is not sufficient for this — instead, the games in question must promote Britishness. Hence MCV's conclusion that Grand Theft Auto V may well be set in London — saving Rockstar an estimated $16m in the process."

Yes, even the article mentions that. It doesn't mean there couldn't be a new GTA London, using the same engine as GTA IV. I'm not sure if they really want to promote "Britishness" with a game series like GTA though, even if its a fun game.

I think a similar game could be done though - something along the lines of Grand Football Hooligan: London.

Or how about, G20 Protest: London - you get the choice of playing either the police or a member of the public. You get to experience good old British tactics, such as kettling, or when that fails, a good old beating them to the ground. You'll face dangerous villains such as people trying to make their way home from work, and protestors armed with digital cameras. Be sure to arrest anyone who asks to se

And anyway, GTA, with its focus on wanton violence and abuse, is somewhat dated. How about a completely different approach: A game where the objective is to drive in a safe, economical, environmentally responsible and polite way through London City in the rush hour, taking into account the one-way system, the roadworks, the tens of thousands of pedestrians crossing the street in front of you, the fact that the London streetmap looks a bit like a Mandelbrot fractal and that streetnames change on average every 20 meters. Now that WOULD be extreme.

GTA's focus on wanton violence and abuse may be dated for London, but it would be highly apt for GTA:Glasgow.

One of the missions in the upcoming GTA:Paisley mission pack is to steal a jeep, set it on fire then crash it into the front of the airport terminal building. Then you have to avoid the irate locals and police, with three "wanted" stars.

Can we get the main characters modeled after the Top Gear crew (the cars should fit the show too!), and have The Doctor somewhere in there?I’d play that!Having the Monty Pythons in there would be icing on the cake. ^^

Imagine you live in a flat, and go to eat in the local restaurant, where you can get spam, spam spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans and spam. Then some weird weird guy at the ministry of silly walks gives you a job where you you have to buy a “British Beetle” at “C

Stealing an ice-cream van could net you a couple of grand, if you stop and sell in the right area.

You know how the GTA4 engine will draw lots of the same type of car to save memory, so it only needs to buffer one model? I work near a taxi office. A long session on GTA4 session followed by seeing lots of near-identical Skoda Octavias and Mercedes C-classes driving can be unsettling...

I'd be keen on seeing how they could implement the congestion charge into the game. Especially in the early parts where you're generally short on cash - somehow beating pedestrians and prostitutes to death for their spare change to pay the fee doesn't seem to promote quite the image of Britishness I would guess the law is aiming at.

On that note, a game involving binge drinking, violence, knife crime, teenage pregnancy, police brutality and political corruption would definitely promote "Britishness" at the moment, but I can't see Our Glorious Leaders giving it the official stamp of approval...

I'd be keen on seeing how they could implement the congestion charge into the game.

I don't think it's a problem. If you don't pay the charge on the day they write to you a week or two later, long after the car has been written off.

Failing that, steal a bus. Preferably a bendy bus, so you can kill extra pedestrians on the corners.

(Or steal a bicycle? Plenty of criminals use bicycles as getaway 'vehicles', they're much faster than cars in central & inner London, and cars can't chase bicycles down narrow streets or steps. Of course, look out for the police on bicycles.)

(Or steal a bicycle? Plenty of criminals use bicycles as getaway 'vehicles', they're much faster than cars in central & inner London, and cars can't chase bicycles down narrow streets or steps. Of course, look out for the police on bicycles.)

Even better, for pure silliness factor, how about a Thames Clipper [tfl.gov.uk]!?

On that note, a game involving binge drinking, violence, knife crime, teenage pregnancy, police brutality and political corruption would definitely promote "Britishness" at the moment, but I can't see Our Glorious Leaders giving it the official stamp of approval...

Yes, because let's not forget that Britain Is Broken. You can't even walk down the street without getting drunk then stabbed and made pregnant by a teenage asylum seeking terrorist high on drugs bought with generous handouts from Gordon "Stalin" Brown.

I wish all the whinging bloody Daily Fail reading UKIP voting morons would fuck off to their villas in Spain (apparently it's only immigration when furriners come here, tax dodging ex-pats polluting someone else's country with their idiocy and refusal to speak

And anyway, GTA, with its focus on wanton violence and abuse, is somewhat dated. How about a completely different approach: A game where the objective is to drive in a safe, economical, environmentally responsible and polite way through London City in the rush hour, taking into account the one-way system, the roadworks, the tens of thousands of pedestrians crossing the street in front of you, the fact that the London streetmap looks a bit like a Mandelbrot fractal and that streetnames change on average every 20 meters. Now that WOULD be extreme.

Yeah-- it had power-ups that were very intuitively obvious and awesome-- but then they abandoned them-- examples were "Instant Gang" and "ElectroFingers".

I remember when the 3D GTA came out for PC and PS2 I was very disappointed. Sure, the graphics were massively redone-- but it lacked the original feel. The announcers voice was gone, no Hare Krishnas's running around chanting, etc etc.

If any game brought back that original feel, with powerups like 'Instant Gang', I'm sure it would be a success. At le

True, the modern GTA games are very different from the old ones though. The 3D GTA games are focused arround completing missions that tell a story, afaict while there were missions in the 2D GTA games there was no concept of completing a story (the levels were won by scoring sufficiant points)

The problem with doing a new GTA: London is that none of the current generation of consoles has the polygon rendering power to render the current roadworks going on in London. I don't even think Fermi can render each of the millions of cones in London right now. You're not going to get far in your stolen car if you're stuck at gas mains works. Never mind the speed cameras, maybe there could be an in-game achievement for racking up 1 million pounds in speeding tickets.

We already know that, and the first GTA was set in Liberty City, but it was still a massively different gaming experience to see it in full 3D for the first time in GTA III and then overhauled for GTA IV. A lot of us have been waiting for similar treatment for the London version for years, now. If this brings it any closer then that's still a good thing in many eyes.

The score system is totally stupid. The only way you can get 16 points is if the game is based in the UK.

Under that model, those seeking relief must score at least 16 points out of a possible 31 in a ‘culturally British’ test. There are four criteria under which studios can qualify that are as follows:a) Cultural Content (16 pts) – Determining whether the film’s narrative is set in the UK, whether its lead characters are British, whether the film is centred on British subject matter,

I would expect the term "trunk" in American English came to mean the rear storage area of a car due to the fact that many early cars had places to put actual trunks(ie. storage containers) on the back of the car.

True, OTOH we brits at least get a lot of american and austrilian TV (a lot of soaps seem to be australian, not sure why) so we learn the little americanisms pretty easilly. Is it not like that in other english speaking countries?

Item A is the only one that really matters. It doesn't matter if it is (C) made in the UK, by (D) EEA employees, if the end product is just an imitation of US culture. Item B is meant to prevent it from just being an non-diverse outsiders caricature of British culture, which is what a game about warm beer, bad cooking and drinking tea would be.

I think his point is that A is the only one that counts, let alone matters. If you have A, you pass regardless of the other options, if you don't have A, there's no way to make it up from the other options. Not just stupid but actively retarded I think.

London would be a fantastic setting for a GTA game; its street layout would be more fun and varied than the grid design of the US cities - I remember the carnage that could be had in the Midtown Madness game set in Paris.

The whole "Geeze, cock'er'ney gangsta, innit" schtick is already very tiresome though (seemingly every single British crime film or TV drama already features it).

I know this is kind of a running joke in this thread, but they could go three ways with it.

1) Make it like San Andreas, where you had to eat/work out in order to keep your health up. A lot of people didn't like that because it was too much micromanagement, so they got rid of it in GTA4. They could add the option to pay the charge on to a cashpoint/ATM or something like that. If you didn't pay it within a certain amount of time, you'd get a fine or the cops after you.

I think with GTA it's not just about the violence it's about the portrayal of gang culture in a rather glorified way along with the relative lack of consequences. Your character can never actually be killed only "wasted" and wake up outside a hospotial.

Though I have to say GTA 4 if you played all of it had a far more negative ending than most of the previous games, I doubt the complainers got that far though.

But the interesting point is that showing the consequences usually results in more criticism (even though, I agree, it makes more sense your way round). E.g., showing the graphical effects, rather than leaving it off-screen; having people die, rather than magically being okay - these are things which people will claim make it more "violent".

Indeed, they are damned if they do damned if they don't. Any game that people want to play (that means the player must to some extent at least succeed in the storyline and people must be able to replay failed missions) and that is set with the player as a criminal gang member will be seen as glorifying gang life.

The trouble is that some folk would say "Oh, but I was going to return it! Honest, Gov'!" and because they were not going to permanently deprive the owner of their property, it was a (very, VERY unlikely, yet still possible) defense to a charge of Theft. Especially in cases when cars were taken from family members and reported stolen, only for a son or daughter to be found joyriding later.

Sony has already done a couple of London based GTA-clones in The Getaway series. The Getaway wasn't very good and the series got worse with every release until it got canned. Still it proves the setting is viable especially if any GTA London riffed on some classic gangster flicks and made good use of the setting. I wonder if they'd use London though or a pastiche of London much like Liberty City is to New York.

It wasn't a great game, but what they did do pretty well was the first model of the centre of London, with accurate-ish streetmaps. I spent a lot of time playing that game, having not driven around London much, and was a bit freaked out to realise that when I drove up to see a Londoner mate a few months later that I actually knew my way around some of it!

For those unaware, most of the GTA series is already developed in the UK, specifically at the Rockstar North offices in Edinburgh. Of course, as the summary points out, they need some more Britishness in the game to get the tax break (although, frankly, the government would do better to give them a tax break for not setting it in the UK).

PS2 had a game called "The Getaway" that was a GTA3 type of open world crime shooter game, the map and landmarks/buildings were accurate to the real streets of London, (at least, that's what I remember) and it was actually quite a fun game....

It hink the possibilities for a London GTA storyline would be endless. They could have the typical london mob boss, like in Guy Ritchie movies, or, they could make it contemporary or set it in the days of the Krays.

I've been to the US many times but never to Washington DC, so I don't know how "authentic" Fallout 3 was in terms of locations in the game and in real-life Washington DC - but I should say that the post-nuclear wreckage in the game was absolutely superb, especially around The Mall and Washington Monument areas where you *REALLY* got the impression of a once huge city now completely destroyed.

So London, with it's wealth of historical locations and landmarks would be a great setting for Fallout also...

Maybe they can finally get more liberal with sex and have an actual hot coffee minigame. But from European cities, I'd rather have Amsterdam on it.

The Dutch have the sex aspect covered but are severely lacking in a bit the ultra-violence.

Now imagine walking around a rainly grey city, in an overcoat wiff a fuk-in ant-eye aircraft gun in you fuk-in trousers, then robbing a bookie. Oh, the glassings, stabbings, beatings, gang warfare of merry old london town, shooting a bobby, smashing CCTV cameras while

Don't see A'dam working.
Imagine this: you get a call. Your mission is to save your sister who is in great danger. You run to your closet, change into your workcloths, grab your guns, run outside to your car. Only to find you have a wheel-clamp because the parkingmeter ran out a minute ago. Hell, they probably have towed it away already!

I'm not sure how that is going to go over with the availability of guns in the UK, and how easy it is to drive in London. Lets face it, half the fun is running down everyone and shooting stuff.

Gun crime stats suggests criminals can get guns just as easily in the UK as they ever have been able to, despite a string of legislation over the last 13 years that's supposed to prevent it. And driving in London's no worse than in any other major city...

A colleague waved out of a car window as I cycled past him on the South Circular this morning. I got to work (a few miles further round the South Circular) only a few seconds before him, but this is going away from Central London at 9:40.

A long time ago (1950s/1960s) there were plans to build fast roads right into the centre of London. Only a few bits got built (e.g. Hammersmith Flyover). Had it all been built everyone in London would have been living close to a noisy, congested, polluting motorway, and bee

"Gun crime stats suggests criminals can get guns just as easily in the UK as they ever have been able to, despite a string of legislation over the last 13 years that's supposed to prevent it. And driving in London's no worse than in any other major city..."

That's a bit of an oversimplification of the system though.

Criminals getting guns is a bit misleading, because, well, when you get a gun like a handgun under UK laws you become a criminal. For example, the perpertrator in Virginia Tech or Columbine weren'

Indeed, characters like Boris the Blade from Guy Ritchie's Snatch could supply the weapons instead of a Guns 'n' Ammo on the street corner, and more heavy duty weaponry could always be liberated from the military later in the game. Actually the idea of everyone being armed with slightly shoddy sawn-off shotguns instead of AR-15's makes it sound a bit more edgy and fun - especially if there's a chance of your gun back-firing during a bank raid, etc.

Yes, and presumably played by people like you who do nothing more than play games and read the gutter press.

The UK has it's problems just like any other nation on this earth but actually most people here (like anywhere else) are law-abiding, tolerant people who just want to live crime-free, religion-free lives in a safe world.

Unfortunately, news of multiracial communities living in peace and harmony, or kids becoming scientists or doctors does not sell newspapers; I don't know where you're from but suggest